Steinberg has announced HALion Player, a new, playback-only version of its HALion virtual sampler. Tailored to newcomers to virtual sampling, HALion Player puts many of the technologies available on the HALion sampling platform behind a sleek, no-frills interface. Capable of playing any HSB, FXP or FXB files created for HALion 3, HALion Player offers an affordable, high quality sample content playback module for VST, DXi and AU.

HALion Player provides a low-cost yet high-quality way of playing any of the hundreds of commercially available HALion libraries, including samples by some of the finest content creators in the industry, such as Scarbee, Garritan, Wizoo, the Vienna Symphonic Library and many more.

HALion Player includes the full HALion 3 sound library, consisting of a broad selection of highest quality instrument and drum sounds, and utilizes the surround-capable HALion 3 playback engine. HALion Player also offers the Waldorf filters and disk-streaming power from HALion 3.

While HALion Player can't create new programs from scratch, the Q-Control concept introduced in the new HALion v3.1 provides HALion Player with an adaptable set of sound-shaping controls. All HALion libraries include predefined Q-Controls which have been assigned to a certain set of parameters by the content creator and are chosen to ideally suit shaping and forming sound for that program. This allows a high degree of flexibility in altering and shaping sounds with HALion Player, while keeping functional clutter to a minimum.

The advanced HALion Player program loading facilities unify finding, selecting and loading a sound for quick, no-hassle access to even the largest HALion sample libraries. HALion Player also offers 256-voice polyphony delivering pristine 32-bit audio to 256 possible audio outputs into the mixer of the host application.

HALion Player will be available through authorized Steinberg dealers for US$89.99 SRP in February 2005. HALion Player customers will be able to upgrade to HALion 3.1 for US$299.99.